"It was at Ross House. We had supper together then——"
"Well, you don't want to—repeat it, do you?" she asked deliberately.
"I want to have supper with you again."
She was undecided whether to be distressed or intrigued. Jack could always arouse her combativeness by criticizing, or—as now—by coolly taking her for granted. But she did not want to repeat the Ross House scene. He had an unpleasant faculty of frightening her—and yet to be frightened by him was not wholly unpleasant....
"You can find some one else far more amusing," she suggested.
"I don't even know who's here."
"But you didn't know I was going to be here."
"I asked Jim—five days ago.... I came straight in here without even taking off my coat. Barbara, may I have supper with you?"
Insensibility, which was his chief characteristic, counted for much. A brazen desire, which she could understand, to treat the Ross House meeting as if it had never occurred might count for more. Barbara would sooner have bandied epigrams with Val Arden or flirted with his supplanter, but she felt that she would be unable to sleep until she knew why Jack had disappeared for more than two months and then followed her to a remote castle in Monmouthshire—and why he came to her, like a needle to a magnet, without waiting to get rid of his scarf and coat.
"I'll have supper with you, if you want me to," she said.